5 things you might not know about... Shappi Khorsandi

Some lesser-known snippets about the British-Iranian comedian

1Khorsandi grew up in west London in the 1980s after her Iranian family fled in exile to the UK. At the age of 11, she wrote to the Ayatollah Khomeini to ask him not to kill her father, a journalist and comedian whose stock-in-trade was political satire. Seems that her plea fell on deaf ears as Scotland Yard came to the family home to warn them of a plot they had uncovered to have Shappi’s pappy assassinated.

2 During her teenage years, Khorsandi suffered from bulimia, recalling how she would mop up any leftovers from the big Middle Eastern buffet-style dinner parties that her parents would throw. She has noted that her bulimia waned when she began taking to the stage to tell jokes.

3 She has a young son, Cassius, with fellow comic and now ex-husband Christian Reilly. She cites the terror of being away from her son for too long as the main reason she turned down I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here.

4 For last year’s Sport Relief, she performed a cheerleading routine to Toni Basil’s ‘Mickey’. Although she’s appeared on Question Time, she insists that busting out some acrobatic televised moves for charity was the most nerve-wracking thing she’s ever done.

5 She had a teenage crush on Sylvester Stallone in his Rambo period. She still blames him today for her failing a bunch of crucial exams.